Officer’s ’66 killing of black teen sparked Hunters Point riots

California National Guardsmen with bayonets hold two men at bay during the Hunters Point riots in September 1966.

Photo: Robert H. Houston, AP

At 2:30 p.m. on a sweltering Tuesday, Sept. 27, 1966, three teenagers were joyriding in a stolen 1958 Buick through Hunters Point in San Francisco. The car stalled on Griffith Street near Oakdale Avenue, just as a police cruiser approached.

The three youths — Darrell Mobley, 14; Clifton Bacon, 15; and Matthew Johnson, 16 — bolted. Mobley ducked down behind a parked car. The other two ran. All were African American.

Alvin Johnson, a white patrol officer with 23 years’ experience on the force, gave chase in his cruiser and tried to cut off Bacon and Matthew Johnson at Navy Road. According to an official city report, he called out to Matthew Johnson, “Stop! Hold it, or I’m going to shoot!”

As the unarmed teenager ran down a hill near a housing project, the patrolman fired four shots, one of which hit the boy in the heart. He died within minutes.

Word of the killing spread rapidly. By late afternoon, dozens of angry people had gathered at Third Street and Palou Avenue, and some young men began talking about attacking the Potrero Station.

Warned that a crisis was brewing, station Cmdr. Harry Nelson and several civil rights leaders went to Third and Palou, where a tense meeting was taking place at the Economic Opportunity Center, a job hall created two years earlier as part of then-President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

The hostile attendees shouted down Nelson and the civil rights leaders, demanding to know if the officer had been arrested for murder. Nelson told them an investigation was being conducted and left at 6:45 p.m.

The crowd was not placated. Outside on Third Street in the 84-degree heat, young men hurled bottles and rocks at police cars, smashed photographers’ cameras and looted a Rexall drugstore and other businesses that were not owned by African Americans. At 7:35 p.m., the first riot call was broadcast over the police radio.

The next three days would see the worst eruption of racial violence in San Francisco since anti-Chinese riots almost 90 years before.

To understand why Hunters Point exploded, it’s necessary to understand its history.

Long a backwater home to fishing operations and slaughterhouses, the southeasternmost part of the city was transformed by World War II. The Navy acquired an existing shipyard and launched an aggressive recruiting drive for workers nationwide. Tens of thousands of African Americans jumped on the opportunity to obtain good-paying jobs and escape the Jim Crow South.

Thousands moved into hastily built dormitories in Hunters Point. Thousands more crowded into the Western Addition, often into homes vacated by Japanese Americans who had been forced into internment camps.

This influx of black workers radically altered San Francisco’s racial makeup. Before the war, San Francisco’s population of 634,536 was 94.5 percent white. Of the 14,011 people who lived in Hunters Point and the adjoining, larger Bayview neighborhood, just seven were black.

By the end of the war, San Francisco’s African American population had risen more than sixfold, to 32,000.

During the war and for a few years after, life in Hunters Point was good. The neighborhood was racially integrated and by most accounts harmonious. One-third of the workers at the huge Hunters Point Naval Shipyard were black. Work was steady and paid well.

But after the war, the jobs began to dry up. White residents left Hunters Point for other city neighborhoods or the suburbs, an option not available to their black counterparts, who faced racial covenants and de facto discrimination. The housing stock, most of it intended to be temporary, deteriorated, and the already-isolated neighborhood was marooned when the Bayshore Freeway was built in 1958.

A generation of young men grew up in poverty, often in squalid public housing projects and in broken families. Drugs and violence spread. In just 15 years, Hunters Point went from a vibrant, multiracial neighborhood to a ghetto.

“I turned to robbing to feed my family and the community,” former Hunters Point resident James Lockett told me. “We couldn’t get jobs. If you went downtown to look for work, they wanted skills, but there was no training.

“My mom was a single woman with four children. As we got older and hungrier, we decided we were going to eat like everyone else. We stole a quarter cow from James Allen’s slaughterhouse and dragged it to the car. We fed about 30 families. What we did wasn’t really crime as crime is today. It was survival.”

In 1964 and 1965, black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Harlem, Watts and Cleveland erupted in violence. A new, militant generation of blacks was turning away from nonviolent civil rights organizations and embracing the fiery new ideology of black power.

Hunters Point was a neighborhood on edge when Matthew Johnson was killed. The next Portals will tell the story of what happened when it exploded.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time

The last trivia question was: Who had the first garden in San Francisco?

Answer: William Leidesdorff’s celebrated garden was located behind his adobe house at California and Montgomery streets.

This week’s trivia question: From 1860 to 1889, what occupied the land of what is now Dolores Park?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.